It was a chance meeting: two strangers, one car, a Barbells for Boobs event.

“By the end of that car ride and the end of the day, we’d made the agreement that when we got back, ‘Hell, we’re going to start our own box,’” Andy Ruddick says of how he and co-owner Peter Davis schemed CrossFit HG3 into existence.

Davis adds: “Our business plan got written on a whiteboard for like a night, and that was it.”

Today, the Harrogate, North Yorkshire, box is 1,500 square feet of working space that came about after the two men visited about 20 boxes in the country to see what worked for others. It has nearly 40 full-time members and is starting a CrossFit Kids program and a class targeting mothers.

“It’s the community that I come for really,” one member says. “I used to go to one of the ‘normal’ gyms and no one would speak to you. You come here and everyone’s cheering each other on, pushing each other. The atmosphere’s totally different. I mean you could do a lot of this stuff on your own, but where’s the fun in that?”

Do you remember your first CrossFit seminar? Thinking about taking the plunge? Well, four clients of CrossFit by Overload decided to attend the Level 1 cert on Jan. 9-10, 2010, at the… Continue Reading

The CrossFit Journal is a chronicle of the empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed CrossFit program. Our mission is to provide a venue for contributing coaches, trainers, athletes, and researchers to ponder, study, debate, and define fitness and collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance.